This is a breakthrough book on student engagement. Join Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves, two award-winning authors and leaders in their field, on a profound educational quest that will take you through exciting and challenging terrain. Five Paths of Student Engagement will open your eyes, heart and mind and empower you to implement practices that lead directly to your students' well-being, learning, and success. By integrating psychological and sociological perspectives, and using inspiring examples from seven years of research, this book delves deeply into the what, why, and how of student engagement. It reveals who and what the true enemies of student engagement are, and shows you how to defeat them. It will enrich and reward your work for years to come. Utilize research-based strategies to promote active engagement in the classroom and build the foundation for student growth: Learn why active engagement is the new frontier of student achievement. Understand how engaging students means so much more than defeating boredom. Consider psychological and sociological theories that cast new light on engagement and motivation. Reflect on how engagement is about mystery and magic, meaning and purpose, and focus and mastery. Understand why increasing classroom engagement requires much more than surveys, rubrics and observation protocols. Learn strategies to battle all five enemies of engagement in order to engage students totally and motivate unmotivated students. Explore five clear paths of engagement that lead to improving student learning and success that all teachers and schools can embark upon immediately. Contents: Preface Chapter 1: From Achievement to Engagement--Two Ages of Educational Change Chapter 2: Theories of Engagement and Motivation--From Maslow to Flow Chapter 3: Three Myths of Engagement--Relevance, Technology, and Fun Chapter 4: The Five Enemies of Engagement--How to Defeat Them Chapter 5: Standardized Testing--The Archenemy of Engagement Chapter 6: The Five Pathways of Student Engagement--In Theory and Practice Chapter 7: The Promise of Engagement--A Battle for Change References Index

Networked learning communities: A powerful school improvement strategy for school leaders! Drawing on their work with schools in North America and England, the authors demonstrate how linking professional learning communities across school or district boundaries creates networked learning communities (NLCs) that can share professional knowledge. Through a sample school narrative, the book illustrates how NLCs can significantly improve instruction, increase student performance, and promote deep and sustained change. This resource examines: Collaborative inquiry as a process that challenges teachers’ thinking, generates new learning, and fosters trusting relationships Formal and informal leadership roles in NLCs How NLCs support systematic data analysis and accountability

Overcoming Disaster: What Colleges Learned from Catastrophe to Recovery provides a resource to help leaders at many levels in an organization understand what can help and hinder their disaster recovery, whether natural or man-made caused. The author and contributors share their lessons learned on recovering from hurricanes and a mass shooting on campus where nine were killed. The seven parts of the book include the aftermath to recovery with chapters on trauma and grief, being overwhelmed, healing, and recovery strategies for individuals, organizations and communities. The finale of the book is a master crisis response cheat sheet.

This timely resource for teachers, leaders, and policymakers provides breakthrough insights into how to improve students' well-being in schools. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, students' well-being was an increasingly prominent concern among educators, as issues related to mental health, global crises, and social media became impossible to ignore. But what, exactly, is well-being? What does it look like, why is it so important, and what can school systems do to promote it? How does it relate to student achievement and social and emotional learning? World-renowned education experts Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley answer these questions and more in this in-depth exploration of the underlying ideas and research findings related to well-being, coupled with examples of policies and implementations from around the globe. The authors make the case for putting well-being ahead of other priorities, such as scores on high-stakes assessments, and explain the three powerful forces that educators can leverage to set up effective well-being policy and practice: prosperity for all, ethical technology use, and restorative nature. Inspiring, thoughtful, and provocative, Well-Being in Schools: Three Forces That Will Uplift Your Students in a Volatile World offers hope in a time of unprecedented challenges. Looking within and beyond the classroom, it charts a path toward a lofty but achievable goal: improved well-being not only for students but also for society as a whole.

A book for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the natural world.

Rethink the roles, responsibilities, and workflow in your blended learning classroom and enjoy balance in your life. Blended learning offers educators the opportunity to reimagine teaching and learning. It allows teachers to partner with their students to assess, track, and reflect on learning. This partnership gives teachers more time and energy to innovate and personalize learning while providing students the opportunity to be active agents driving their own growth. If one thing is certain after the 2019-2020 school year, blended learning is here to stay. Learning must be a shared endeavor between the teacher and the learner. This book provides teachers with strategies to rethink traditional workflows to make teaching practices sustainable. Written by blended learning expert, Catlin Tucker, this resource provides teachers with concrete strategies and resources they can use to partner with their students to actively engage them in setting goals, monitoring their development, reflecting on their growth, using feedback to improve work, assessing the quality of their work, and communicating their progress with parents. Balance With Blended Learning includes Practical strategies for teachers overwhelmed by their workloads Routines and protocols designed to move feedback and assessment into the classroom to eliminate much of the work teachers take home Ready-to-use templates and resources designed to help students take an active role in tracking, monitoring, and reflecting on their progress Vignettes written by teachers across disciplines Stories from the author′s extensive experience both as a teacher and blended -learning coach Redefining roles in a blended learning classroom encourages students to take ownership over their learning journeys and helps teachers feel more effective, efficient, and energized.

The memoir of an innovative American educator and the remarkable school she built—“a lucid presentation of what progressive education can accomplish” (The New York Times). Over a century ago, American educator Caroline Pratt created an innovative school that fosters creativity and independent thought by asking the provocative question: “Was it unreasonable to try to fit the school to the child, rather than . . . the child to the school?” A strong-willed small-town schoolteacher who ran a one-room schoolhouse by the time she was seventeen, Pratt came to viscerally reject the teaching methods of her day, which often featured a long-winded teacher at the front of the room and rows of miserable children sitting on benches nailed to the floor. In this “persuasive presentation of progressive education,” Pratt recounts how she founded what is now the dynamic City and Country School in New York City, invented the “unit blocks” that have become a staple in classrooms around the globe, and played an important role in reimagining preschool and primary-school education in ways that are essential for the tumultuously creative time we live in today (Kirkus Reviews).